Never let me go

How is it possible to make genres as often seen and timeless as the portrait and the landscape indisputably contemporary? How to go beyond the maddening back and forth between the real and the ideal, between being and seeming, in which those genres are so often trapped to the detriment of their efficacy?

Before Carolina Antich's paintings, the question that comes to mind is less why or for what purpose she paints than for whom. One hypothesis might be that she paints for herself, but not as a psychological-therapeutic exercise or an exercise in self-knowledge, but rather as the dogged research of an artist determined to find out what remains of a painting (a figurative painting?) when it is rid of perspective, of composition, of detail. But how abstract are Antich's figurative paintings, then? Perhaps her works are a means to reconcile a very personal idea of abstraction and another, equally particular, idea of figuration.

It's not hard to imagine our painter in her studio in La Giudecca, Venice, carefully adhering to an artistic protocol that goes against the natural and progressive process that leads to a finished work of art. Carolina appears to interrupt and to madden that process to get what she is after: leave in the painting only what she deems absolutely essential. Perhaps she starts out painting a picture whose background is deliberately jarring in terms of color to then attack characters and objects that, though simple or generic, are rich in painstaking detail, characters and objects that inhabit scenes, landscapes, her landscapes. That is when, normally, the work would be considered finished. But, it would seem, it is the instant when, in Antich's case, the truly pictorial battle is launched—a calculated battle waged without a trace of hesitation. It is at that juncture that she begins to wear away the layers of acrylic paint that she had painted, stopping only when she has reached the final layer. Only then does she leave the background behind to turn to the figures, blurring their traits and particularities to emphasize instead the languid and perplexed look in their eyes. Antich renders us defenseless so that we, her viewers, are confronted with "the painting" itself, with no euphemisms. Otherwise, how to explain such pictorial economy in the background, such unrelenting ambiguity in the frontally portrayed characters, such desolation in the landscape? But, mostly, how else to explain that it takes the artist so long to paint each of her works?

Produced over the course of the last three years, the paintings in Quarzo extol two-dimensionality doubly—first on the surface of the canvas and then in the image represented—to devise their symbolic argument according to an agenda determined by the artist. The reduced repertoire is part of that agenda—indeed, its key: each one of these works depicts young people who seem wholly incapable of connecting to one another, who—vexed and ambiguous, passive and with no desire—wander aimlessly, emotionally adrift. At a distance from any fatality or affliction, they are Ishiguro-like cyborgs; on top of a rock, sailing a canoe, or watching the water go by, they are revealed to be subjects that have given into their fate, creatures that try to build a bridge in order to stay, if just for a little while longer, on this side. Sonia BecceApril 2017